Winter Wanderings part 1 - Sanborn Park

We don't really live in a place we could call a "winter wonderland" (and I don't even think we technically have winters at all!). So the next few posts are a series of our latest "winter wanderings".

Lucas hung up his birdhouse that he painted over Christmas break

Last year we set a goal to visit all our county parks. Well, a year later, we've still barely scratched the surface, but we are working on it! We've set aside a weekend a month to explore a park. In January we went to Sanborn park in Saratoga. I absolutely love this park. It has a great nature trail (very kid friendly) through the redwoods and a fair amount of wildlife. Every summer they hold an insect fair at the youth science institute which is pretty amazing! We were really hoping to see some banana slugs but there weren't any this time...probably need some warmer weather.

Lets go on an "expetition" guys!

The kids loved creating imaginary kingdoms among the huge boulder forest

Dad joined in the make believe adventures

Elijah loved finding his perfect 'home' between the rocks

Traversing the fallen trees

Newt hunting in the pond...they spent a long time hunting for one before our walk, but we didn't actually see them until after we finished.

Caught one! (with the camera, that is). These newts have really cool yellow bellies.

I love this picture of his glowing eyes!

This little fella loved being carted around through the forest.

The boys loved doing 'stick races' down the stream

My littlest man and I

I've really been getting into birds lately. They are fascinating to watch, a challenge to photograph at times, and a wonderful way to get kids excited about nature.

A beautiful western bluebird

Western Scrub Jay

Robin on the left and a gorgeous unidentified bird on the right...some kind of Oriole maybe?

I love watching this guy slowly explore the world around him

I love being outside Mom!

And I love having brothers to help take care of me...

...and love me to pieces!! :)

Funny little aside story. We had lunch before our hike, and when we were collecting all our things, we realized that Elijah's water bottle (new from Christmas) was missing. So we hunted, and hunted and hunted for it. We must have spent 40 minutes hunting for that darn thing everywhere we'd been. We said a prayer to find it and still no luck. We have lost so many water bottles over the years and I was getting pretty tired of spending more money to keep saving plastic! Then, of course, after we got back to the car, there it was in the backseat all along!! (and we'd even looked there with out finding it earlier). Ah, we of little faith!